Media sites and the teams that are tasked with developing and maintaining them face a unique set of challenges. Much like all IT Ops and Development teams, they need to be concerned with consistent internal and external monitoring to insure that the site is available and that it is performing…

Why the 200ms delay? Over the course of our work, we have the fortune of diving into numerous network issues. One particularly interesting one involves a curious ~200ms delay in the acknowledgement of the response packet for small HTTP responses. This doesn’t sound all that terrible unless you have a…

In our previous articles on DNS we gave an overview of the recursion process, but before we can go further on how DNS impacts performance, we need to understand how it the DNS protocol works. In the TCP/IP Protocol suite, DNS is an application layer protocol. DNS protocol relies on…

At Catchpoint, we believe that fast DNS (Domain Name System) is just as important as fast content. DNS is what translates your familiar domain name (www.google.com) into an IP address your browser can use (173.194.33.174). This system is fundamental to the performance of your webpage, yet most people don’t fully…

Ever get asked to explain or elaborate on something that you should definitely know, only to realize that you don’t fully understand it yourself? You’re certainly not alone. Even though the basics of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections are one of the very first topics covered when learning about computer…

When performing statistical analysis on aggregations, it is very important to understand its subsets. This is especially true when interpreting RUM data aggregated across multiple regions, since an end user’s distance from the datacenter hosting the website impacts the performance of the page on end user’s browser. To illustrate this…